"The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura" – If iconic imagery makes for powerful propaganda, should we treat questions of historical truth or falsehood as irrelevant?

(One of many stamps in the Arab world commemorating the martyrdom of Mohammed al-Dura.  For more, see here.)

Some people have argued, explicitly or in effect, that we should indeed treat those factual questions as mere distractions from the 'deeper truth' conveyed by such images. I disagree. I think that kind of perspective is both mistaken and pernicious.

I happened to be reminded of an e-mail exchange on these issues that I had with someone named Adam Rose back in 2003. The focus of that discussion was a world-famous incident during the Second Intifada in 2000, the explosion of violence that erupted after the breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura, was allegedly killed by sustained fire from Israeli troops at a Gaza checkpoint while he cowered for protection behind his father against a wall, eventually dying in his father's arms. A televised portrayal of his death, filmed by a Palestinian cameraman and broadcast by the French news service France2, inflamed public opinion across the Arab world and beyond.



That passionate reaction was understandable, since this looked like the deliberate and gratuitously sadistic murder of a helpless child by Israeli soldiers. As James Fallows pointed out at the beginning of a careful analysis of this incident that he published in 2003, "Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?":

The image of a boy shot dead in his helpless father's arms during an Israeli confrontation with Palestinians has become the Pietà of the Arab world. [....] The name Mohammed al-Dura is barely known in the United States. Yet to a billion people in the Muslim world it is an infamous symbol of grievance against Israel and—because of this country's support for Israel—against the United States as well.

Al-Dura was the twelve-year-old Palestinian boy shot and killed during an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators on September 30, 2000. The final few seconds of his life, when he crouched in terror behind his father, Jamal, and then slumped to the ground after bullets ripped through his torso, were captured by a television camera and broadcast around the world. Through repetition they have become as familiar and significant to Arab and Islamic viewers as photographs of bombed-out Hiroshima are to the people of Japan—or as footage of the crumbling World Trade Center is to Americans. Several Arab countries have issued postage stamps carrying a picture of the terrified boy. One of Baghdad's main streets was renamed The Martyr Mohammed Aldura Street. Morocco has an al-Dura Park. In one of the messages Osama bin Laden released after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he began a list of indictments against "American arrogance and Israeli violence" by saying, "In the epitome of his arrogance and the peak of his media campaign in which he boasts of 'enduring freedom,' Bush must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing." [....]

As Fallows explained in his article, it was already clear in 2003 that however Mohammed al-Dura died, he was almost certainly not killed by gunfire from the Israeli checkpoint.  Fallows correctly observed:  "The evidence will not change Arab minds—but the episode offers an object lesson in the incendiary power of an icon."

Since then, a long series of legal proceedings in France, during which France2 was compelled to divulge significant portions of the raw footage from which the televised broadcast was edited, have raised even more troubling questions. It turns out that many of the claims made by France2 about that raw footage were dishonest and misleading, and the footage itself looks very fishy. In the end, it is not even clear whether Mohammed al-Dura (or another boy) actually died in that incident, and no solid evidence has ever been produced to confirm that this occurred. It seems possible, at least, that the whole thing was a brilliantly effective hoax. (If so, that would leave open the question of whether France2 consciously participated in this hoax or else—which I suspect is more likely—was taken in along with everyone else, in part because the version of the story that they televised fit their preconceptions.)

These and other factual issues remain highly contentious. But many people are not even aware that the original version of the story has been effectively debunked, and continue to assume that it is true. And for other people, pursuing these factual questions is ultimately irrelevant and even unseemly, since it can only distract attention from the truly fundamental point—the unjust and oppressive Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and Israel's brutal and repressive treatment of the Palestinians more generally.

=> Are those people right? In August 2003, via the e-mail list of Chicago Peace Now, I was alerted to a piece which made that argument explicitly: "The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura: A Response to James Fallows".

An interesting perspective regarding the death of Mohammed al-Dura from Adam Rose for all of you.

I responded:

Thanks for passing along this piece by Adam Rose, but I cannot resist one comment.

Rose sums up the thrust of his argument well at the beginning of his piece:

Whether or not a particular 12-year-old boy died at the hands of Israeli soldiers, the image of Mohammed al-Dura is an authentic symbol of the Israeli occupation.

He elaborates later in the piece:

This points to the second and larger problem with Fallows's argument: his narrow and incomplete understanding of "truth". From Fallows's perspective, the truth that matters is who shot Mohammed al-Dura and the truth is either that he was shot by Israelis or that he was not and the Israelis were framed. And, of course, in one sense this is right and important. But there is another, even more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature. And it is this symbolic truth that Fallows completely misconstrues.

This is indeed an "interesting perspective," but it is hardly new or original. In fact, it's quite familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of 20th-century politics. It's a typically Stalinist position on the question of historical and political "truth," which received its most notorious "philosophical" justification in Merleau-Ponty's appalling book Humanism and Terror, and was expressed (and applied) in more vulgar practical forms by people like Zhdanov and legions of hardworking ordinary propagandists. That is, petty and superficial questions of empirical "truth" or "falsehood" are meaningless or trivial by comparison with the "deeper" truths of the basic, overriding struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. In fact, obsessing about these supposed "factual" questions (rather than focusing on the "more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature," as Rose forthrightly puts it) is not just trivial and misleading, but "objectively" reactionary or even fascist.

Thus, Comrade Fallows's mistake is clear. He has fallen into the typically petty-bourgeois fallacy of what used to be called "empiricism". As Lukacs would have explained to poor Fallows, his thinking needs to be more "concrete"—that is, whether or not Mohammed al-Dura happened to be brutally murdered by Israeli soldiers in some narrow "factual" sense has no bearing on the "more important truth" that this image (not the image of his death, but the image of his deliberate murder by Israeli soldiers) is nevertheless an "authentic" symbol of the Israeli occupation. Since this image is "authentic" (in the sense of its larger "symbolic truth," which is obviously the "more important truth of the matter"), it's absurd to get hung up on whether or not the event in question actually happened.

As Leszek Kolakowski once argued in a penetrating essay on "Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie", the real innovation of Stalinist political culture in this regard was not its tendency to base politics on lies (which is, alas, a very widespread and ordinary practice with a long history), but rather its systematic effort to undermine the whole sense that there was any meaningful or legitimate distinction between "truth" and "lies" in any empirical sense. (Some non-Stalinists who grasped this innovation, such as Goebbels, praised and admired it.) This effort was embodied most powerfully in the everyday operations of totalitarian political regimes, but it also required more sophisticated justifications by people like Lukacs and Merleau-Ponty and a host of less prominent thinkers and propagandists (many of whom were not Stalinists themselves, but rather fellow-travelers, admirers, and/or imitators).

(And by the way, to head off a rather common straw man in advance: This goes well beyond the important and illuminating recognition that our understandings of the world are unavoidably shaped by differing perspectives informed by different conceptual and symbolic frameworks, often rooted in different experiences and influenced by different interests. All of that is profoundly true and important, but it does not necessarily mean that we should give up any effort to distinguish in principle between trying to tell the truth and deliberate lying.)

I don't know whether you ever happened to see an interesting mid-1960s movie by Godard, "La Chinoise". The protagonists are a small cell of student "Maoists" in France. In one episode of the film, one of them recounts, with great admiration and enthusiasm, a news story about some Chinese students who had recently returned from Moscow to China, against the backdrop of the intensifying Sino-Soviet ideological conflict. They came off the plane with their heads wrapped in bandages–the result, they explained to waiting journalists, of the brutal beatings they had received from Soviet police (which in turn were the result and expression of the anti-revolutionary "revisionism" of the Soviet regime). The Chinese students talked about these beatings, and their injuries, at some length. Then they unwrapped the bandages, which revealed that they actually had no injuries. The French student telling the story commented that the journalists, who were startled by this, were too stupid to understand the point. They were hung up on the superficial fact that there were no injuries–and thus, presumably, no brutal beatings. As Adam Rose could have explained to them, they had entirely missed "the more important truth of the matter connected to its symbolic nature." The question of whether or not these particular beatings occurred was quite beside the point. Even if they hadn't taken place, the "more important truth" was that these beatings—and the whole imagery of the Chinese students' injuries, their bandages, etc.—nevertheless constituted "an authentic symbol" of the revisionism and counter-revolutionary brutality of the Soviet regime.

=> Yes, this is an "interesting perspective," which has often been used with great ingenuity and even perverse brilliance—often with good intentions and idealistic agendas, too. But I think the political history of the past century shows that it has some serious drawbacks as well. For this and other reasons, it's not a perspective that I find convincing or attractive ... and, to be perfectly honest, I tend to find its current manifestations (often presented in "post-modern" or "post-structuralist" guises) ridiculous and/or alarming ... and sometimes despicable and morally irresponsible as well.

Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. On balance, I mostly disagree with the substance of what Rose has to say in this piece, but he does bring up some valid (or partly valid, or potentially valid) points. However, they could have been developed more usefully and effectively without putting them in the overall framework of a perspective which argues that the "artistic truth" of images that vividly confirm what you already "know" (i.e., that represent and reinforce widely held prejudices) is more important than trying to figure out what actually happened.

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Adam Rose replied (and I should let him have his say):

Subject: Re: [peacenowchicago] "The Truth of Mohammed al-Dura"
From: Adam Rose
To: Jeff Weintraub , Peace Now
Date: Thu 7 Aug 2003 09:19:46 -0500

Jeff:

As the author of the piece in question, I read your comments with great interest and would like to offer the following response.

1) Whatever the possible connections with Stalinism, etc., the distinction between symbolic and historical truth has both an honorable pedigree and excellent reputation in many modern circles. With respect to the former, I tried to show, for example, that Aristotle (who I presume is still in high standing--or at least not to be simply tarred and dismissed as a Stalinist) both recognized the distinction and held symbolic (or "poetic") truth in higher esteem in historical truth. I further tried to show that this distinction is commonly found useful in considering works of art. After all, how is one to think about the "truth" of "fiction" (works that are absolutely false in the historical sense)?

From this perspective, a representation of an event can have one of four possible "truth values":

symbolic     historical
1) TRUE    TRUE
2) TRUE     FALSE
3) FALSE   TRUE
------------------------
4) FALSE   FALSE

In cases 1 and 3, there is a historically-true representation--the event depicted "really happened". In cases 1 and 2, there is a symbolically-true representation--the event depicted "commonly/typically/always happens" and the representation is not so much of an event as of event-type and the event-type is true even if the specific event is not.

As I tried to show, these distinctions are commonly (and reasonably, I think) invoked in analyses of "historically-dubious" representations. Thus, truth of Shakespeare's Macbeth is generally acknowledged not to be its historic truth (whatever connection it may have to the historic truth about the historic figure Macbeth). Rather, the truth of Shakespeare's Macbeth -- like all tragedy -- is generally considered to be its symbolic truth, the sense that it conveys that "there but for the grace of God go I (or perhaps: "I'm never going to fall into THAT trap!").

Although I didn't mention it in the essay, such distinctions are also commonly used in considerations of the Bible and other scriptures. After all, it turns out that many of the events depicted may not be historically-true, starting with Creation and running through Moses and the exodus to the resurrection of Jesus. Rather than dismiss a historically-false Bible as a fraud of no value, many people (including many non-Stalinists) consider the symbolic truth of the events depicted to be of great value. From this perspective the Moses in the Bible is seen as akin to the Macbeth in Shakespeare's play.

2) As I said in my essay none of this is to say that I (or Aristotle or anyone else) deny the importance of historical truth. Of course it matters what "really happened". On the other hand, it is also important to keep the relevance of historical truth in perspective -- just as it is important to keep the relevance of symbolic truth in perspective.

In the case of Mohammed al-Dura, I think it is fair to say that most people exercised by the image/incident don't give a damn about the actual boy. And in some ways, rightly so. One individual tragedy is just one individual tragedy and the world is full of those--too full for people to empathize with all of them. Moreover, if such an event were believed/known to be unique or unusual--like a freak earthquake or a child falling down a well--it would not have resonated so strongly on all sides.

Rather it is the symbolic truth--the belief / knowledge that the al-Dura image depicts an event-type--that exercises everyone (including the Israelis bent on disproving the historical truth of the incident). But because of widespread misunderstanding, almost everyone THINKS it is the historical truth that is critically important. Thus all the energy to prove or disprove the historical truth of the incident. In short, in the wider sense of world politics, etc., harsh as it may sound, the historical truth of the death of one boy is meaningless--however it occurred--to everyone on all sides of the issue.

What matters is whether the depiction of al-Dura's death represents a genuine event-type--an event-type of small Palestinian boys armed with rocks at most being killed by larger Israeli boys armed with the most sophisticated weaponry available. And as I argued in the essay, there is a wealth of valid historically-true evidence (from B'Tselem and many others) that this event-type exists. Thus I think the case here is quite different from "La Chinoise" as you describe it.

Although I am generally wary of invoking the Holocaust, I think the case of Anne Franks is instructive here. On some brutal level, nobody gives a damn about the terrorization and death of one girl. What make her story so compelling is that it is taken as representative of the terrorization and deaths of thousands and millions and it is the system designed and implemented to create thousands and millions of Anne Franks that is truly horrifying. Now suppose the Diary of Anne Frank had been written as a work of fiction or that it turned out her father or others tinkered with the text or even fabricated it outright, would it tell us less about the horror of that system? Would it make the diary any less a "Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Children" who died invisibly (in contrast to "Anne Frank" whose death has been made visible to us)? In short, would it have anything to do at all with whether or not there was or was not a genuine "Anne Frank event-type" and whether the Diary was an authentic symbol of that event-type?

In some ways, of course, the answer is "yes". But in many, many ways, the answer is "no". And I think it is important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

(FOR THE RECORD: I AM NOT SAYING HERE THAT THE OCCUPATION IS THE EQUIVALENT OF THE HOLOCAUST IN ANY WAY. JUST THAT IT PROVIDES A PARALLEL EXAMPLE THAT JEWS AND THOSE SYMPATHETIC TO THEM ARE LIKELY TO EMPATHIZE WITH.)

From an opposite perspective, the assassination of JFK is equally instructive. In this case there really is no symbolic truth of the matter. JFK's death does NOT represent the death of many others. People really mourn the particular, individual man and the historical facts of who killed him are critical--including whether or not shots were fired from the "grassy knoll".

The revisionist analysis of Mohammed al-Dura tries to treat the event a JFK-type event, when it is really an Anne Frank-type event.

3) All of this seems to come to a head in the issue of what it takes to make "the Arabs" believe that "the Israelis/Jews" are "boy-killers". Fallows's piece suggests that "the Arabs" have no good reason for thinking this. On the contrary, he suggests they think what they want to think regardless of the evidence. Yet as I tried to show, they DO have the evidence. We all do, if we want to see it.

In your concluding remark on my piece you write:

P.S. On balance, I mostly disagree with the substance of what Rose has to say in this piece, but he does bring up some valid (or partly valid, or potentially valid) points. However, they could have been developed more usefully and effectively without putting them in the overall framework of a perspective which argues that the "artistic truth" of images that vividly confirm what you already "know" (i.e., that represent and reinforce widely held prejudices) is more important than trying to figure out what actually happened.

As I have argued in my essay and here, what the Arabs "know" is NOT simply widely-held prejudice (though of course it may be reinforced by that). And it is the blithe dismissal / delegitimization of this knowledge that I object to first and foremost.

If there is a de facto Israeli policy of creeping annexation,
If there is a de facto Israeli policy of "breaking" the Palestinians,
If there is a de facto Israeli policy of predation,
If Israel has both killed over 366 Palestinian minors and given every indication that such deaths are important only insofar as they contribute to the achievement of Israeli policy --

If all of this is true then the event-type depicted in the image of Mohammed al-Dura is also true. And on the world-historical level, it is the truth this event-type that really matters and that attention should be focused on. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. (Something that I understand Stalin was quite good at.)

Adam Rose

P.S. If you or others are interested, a formatted copy of the essay, complete with pictures, can be downloaded and printed from www.supportsanity.org (PDF 1.2 MB).

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I responded in turn:

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your response to my remarks, which was serious, thoughtful, and (under the circumstances) quite temperate. I am getting at my e-mail only intermittently these days, so I just saw your message, and I can offer only a quick and incomplete counter-response.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that I am not really convinced, but let me restate some of the reasons why I feel that way.  To put it too briefly: I have no problem, in principle, with recognizing some kind of distinction between "historical" and "poetic" truth (for reasons that Aristotle, Kenneth Burke, and various others have suggested in various ways). (Despite my harsh words about Lukacs, I even think there is something insightful and potentially illuminating about his notion of "typical" as opposed to merely "average" or "naturalistic" representations.) The key question is how these concepts are used, or misused.  In particular, artistic representations that present themselves as fiction should be judged by different standards from stories, arguments, images, and other forms of communication and representation that claim to be factually true.

As for those pieces of "knowledge" that you list toward the end of your message ("If there is a de facto Israeli policy of creeping annexation" etc.) ... I think someone who "knows" those things is in fact correct, and absolutely nothing I said implies "blithe dismissal / delegitimization of this knowledge". In my opinion, that's a red herring.

On the other hand, if someone "knows" that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is defined fundamentally and essentially by the deliberate and gratuitously sadistic murder of unarmed civilians, including the murder of helpless and completely unthreatening children "for sport"—the supposed "truth" that you say is conveyed by the image of Mohammed al-Dura's martyrdom and the way it has been interpreted—then I would submit that they're wrong ... and that reinforcing and endorsing that particular belief is not just mistaken but pernicious and destructive.  In my opinion, that crosses the line between legitimate (or plausible) criticism and condemnation of Israeli policies and actions to hysterical and indiscriminate demonization of Israel and Israelis.  That kind of demonization is all too common in the world today, and endorsing and reinforcing it is both and unwise and reprehensible.  At least, that is my strong and considered opinion.

In that crucial sense, "the image of Mohammed al-Dura" is not "an authentic symbol of the Israeli occupation."  And if the specific story conveyed by that particular image isn't even factually accurate, then that's an additional problem.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

The Jewish problem in Malmö, Sweden

This is a long-running story, mostly depressing.  And in some ways the case of Malmö, Sweden's third-largest city, exemplifies tendencies one can also see in other places around Europe—not everywhere, but in enough places to be worrisome.  So it deserves some attention, both for its own sake and for illustrative purposes.

The most intense and explicit expressions of anti-semitism in Malmö, including physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, come mostly from a growing population of Muslim immigrants. But a pervasive atmosphere of hysterical anti-Zionism (i.e., systematic bias and hostility against Israel and Israelis, shading off into obsessive hatred and demonization) either blends into outright anti-semitism or, at the very least, makes anti-semitism seem excusable and 'understandable'.  Thus, anti-semitism is not taken seriously; or is explained away as a side-effect of poverty and social dislocation, which the Jews should just learn to live with rather than whining about it; or is blamed on the Jews themselves.

Sound familiar?  It should.

=> The Swedish lawyer and journalist Paulina Neuding published an informative report about Malmö in the Tablet in April 2012  Some highlights:

The store window had been smashed many times before. The shoe-repair shop is located in one of the rougher parts of Malmö, Sweden, and the Jewish owner, a native of the city, had gotten used to this sort of vandalism. But in the spring of 2004, a group of immigrants just under the age of 15—too young to be prosecuted by Swedish law—walked into the store yelling about “damn Jews.” The owner was hit in the face by one of the boys. Yasha, an 85-year-old customer and relative of mine, was struck in the back of his head. The doctor who received him at the emergency room concluded that he must have been hit with a blunt object. “I left Poland to get away from anti-Semitism,” he later told the police. “But at least there I never experienced any violence. That only happened to me here, in Sweden.”

The Jews of Malmö, a community of about 1,500 in a city of 300,000, are living through a new form of anti-Semitism. This kind does not stem from neo-Nazis or right-wing extremists—traditional perpetrators of European Jew-hatred—but has come to the city through immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and is part of a larger, countrywide problem of failed integration. According to the 2011 census, one in 10 Malmö citizens comes from the Middle East and North Africa, and ethnic Swedes are no longer in the majority among 15-year-olds. In 2009, 60 hate crimes against Jews were reported in Malmö, ranging from hate speech to assault. The city’s Chicago-born Chabad rabbi, Shneur Kesselman, estimates that he alone has been the victim of 100 incidents during his few years in the city. A dozen families have already left Malmö for Stockholm, Israel, or the United States because of anti-Semitism, according to community leaders.

If only this were the whole problem. But Malmö’s mayor of 17 years, Ilmar Reepalu, has “Tourettes syndrome with respect to Jews,” according to Kvällsposten, a Swedish newspaper. Last week, Reepalu, a Social Democrat, made headlines across the country after I published an interview with him in which he said that Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party with its roots in the Swedish neo-Nazi movement, had “infiltrated” Malmö’s Jewish community in order to turn it against Muslims. On Monday, he was publicly reprimanded by the head of his party.

Reeplau has promised that he is no anti-Semite, but this is far from the first time that he has put his foot in his mouth on the subject of Jews. When a journalist from the Malmö daily Skånska Dagbladet asked him in January 2010 about growing anti-Semitism in his city, he replied, “We accept neither anti-Semitism nor Zionism in Malmö.” His reaction to the fact that Jews are leaving his city because of anti-Semitism was to maintain that “there have been no attacks against Jews, and if Jews want to leave for Israel that is not a concern for Malmö.” In an interview with Danish television in March 2010, he described criticism about his statements regarding Jews and Zionism as an attack orchestrated by “the Israeli lobby.”  [....]

[JW:  This is an increasingly common rhetorical dodge, which my friend David Hirsh has labeled "The Livingstone Formulation" after one of its most notorious practitioners, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone.  When someone says or does something anti-semitic and is challenged for it, or sometimes is just being asked about expressions of anti-semitism by others, he responds by changing the subject and claims that he is being attacked for bring critical of Israel, Zionism, or Israeli policies.  He may also claim to be a victim of targeting by the "Israel Lobby", the Jewish-controlled media, or some combination thereof.  Whatever the specific details, the basic premise is that criticisms of anti-semitism are never made in good faith, so they should invariably be dismissed and twisted into something underhanded and reprehensible.  For David Hirsh's careful and perceptive critical analysis of the Livingstone Formulation and its permutations, see here.]

[....] During Israel’s 2008-2009 war against Hamas in Gaza, there was a sharp increase in anti-Semitic violence in Malmö—but the mayor didn’t seem concerned. On Dec. 27, 2008, as Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Cast Lead, the Jewish community of Malmö held a demonstration in the city’s main square to express sympathy for “all civilian victims” in Gaza and the Jewish state. They were soon confronted by a much larger counter-demonstration, consisting mainly of immigrants from the Middle East. The Jews were singing hine ma tov, but was their song was overwhelmed by chants of “damn Jews” and “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!” A glass bottle flew through the air and hit a Jewish girl in the back. When a homemade bomb was fired straight into the Jewish group, the police decided to evacuate them. The Jews fled from the square but were followed by kids who used cellphones to report back to the counter-demonstration with which direction “the Jews” were heading. Among those running were 85-year-old Yasha’s grandchildren, all born and raised in Malmö.

When Reepalu was questioned about these events, he chose to criticize the Jews of his city for not taking a firm stand against the policies of the state of Israel: “Instead they choose to have a demonstration at the main square, which can send the wrong signals,” he said, while referring in passing to Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

Two months after the Cast Lead demonstration, I went to Malmö on the occasion of a Davis Cup tennis match between Sweden and Israel. The city made the decision that no audience would be allowed at the match, marking the first time Sweden decided to subject a country to a sports boycott since barring South African athletes from entering the country during apartheid. “Don’t forget,” said Reepalu, “this isn’t a match against just anyone. It’s a match against the state of Israel.” Anarchists, feminists, Islamists, and left-wing extremists from around the country gathered in the city to protest against Israel. [....]

When I met with the mayor in February, he added: “I realize that this is a minefield, but I will happily enter it in order for this issue to get the right proportions. I get accused of being an anti-Semite when I say that Jews are actually not the only ones having a hard time, but that things are actually just as hard and sometimes even harder for other groups.”

It’s true—Jews aren’t the only residents of Malmö with safety concerns. Malmö’s high rates of crime have earned the city the moniker “Sweden’s Chicago.” In 2011 and early 2012, several people were killed in the city in what are believed to be gang shootings. When a teenage boy was shot dead on New Year’s Eve, more than a thousand people took to the streets to protest against the violence under the slogan “Enough, damn it.”

High crime rates, especially among certain immigrant communities, have caused deep anxiety for the people of Malmö—and yet politicians and pundits are reluctant to discuss the issue, partly out of a genuine fear of stirring up racism and Islamophobia. [....]

Consider the fate of Rosengård, a housing project originally built in the late 1960s as part of the government’s plan to provide affordable, modern homes for the working class. In 1969, when Yasha and his wife Nina moved into Rosengård, having fled the anti-Semitic Polish government of Wladyslaw Gomulka, Rosengård stood as a monument of the egalitarian society that was under way, planned and executed by the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Today, Rosengård has become the symbol of ghettoization at the heart of the Scandinavian welfare state. Out of Rosengård’s 22,000 inhabitants, 89 percent are immigrants or children of immigrants. Only 39 percent of residents between the ages of 20 and 64 are employed. In the capital of Stockholm, you would have to take a subway ride to the suburbs to see an area characterized by poverty and lack of assimilation. But Rosengård lies just a 25-minute walk from Malmö’s city center. [....]

The claim that inequality is the root cause of violence in Malmö is not just absurd, it carries unacceptable implications: It means that Jews can do nothing but wait for society to become more equal, and for discrimination and unemployment to go away, before they can ask to feel safe in their own city.

Fredrik Sieradzski, 47, is a Jew from Malmö who got tired of waiting for the city’s politicians to take action against anti-Semitic threats and harassment. He recently initiated what he calls “kippah walks” through the streets of the city. Members of the community meet up after services on Saturdays and walk through town wearing visible Jewish symbols. [....] Last time around, his kippa walk gathered 20 people. Among them was one non-Jew who wanted to show his solidarity.

The kippah walks have become a way of dealing with a fear of anti-Semitism that permeates all aspects of Jewish life in Malmö. When Yasha passed away in 2010, as the mourners left the gates of the Jewish cemetery, his son-in-law warned the people who had traveled to Malmö to attend the service: “Take off your yarmulkes. Don’t forget that this is Rosengård.

=>  Since then, there have been both encouraging and discouraging developments, though the fundamental situation doesn't appear to have changed much. Here are some highlights from a March 2013 article in an English-language Swedish newspaper, The Local:

Video cameras and a heavy combination locked door greet visitors as they approach Malmö’s Jewish community centre. Once inside, appointments are made with a secretary who sits behind thick glass.

Security has been stepped up in the building, which is located in central Malmö, following an explosion last September that led to arrests and was classified as a hate crime by local police.

The attack was just the one in a long line of anti-Semitic incidents which have become increasingly common in Sweden’s third largest city. [....]

But Malmö’s small Jewish population is fighting back. Amidst the shattered glass and reports of persecution the incidents are being used as a catalyst for change involving not only local Jews but also the wider populace. [....]

[Jehoshua] Kaufman started organizing regular kippah walks in Malmö back in December 2011 as a reaction to persistent anti-Semitism.

"Wearing a kippah is not just a protest against anti-Semitism but also a revival of the Jewish self-confidence," he explains.

"Now people describe themselves in newspapers as Jewish and are active in the community. They are more conscious of their identity. It is not as bad as it could be."

A recent kippah walk in Malmö prompts a healthy turnout of people from all across the city. Many are motivated to show their support for local Jews following media reports of persecution and intimidation.

"I’m not Jewish but I'm a Christian and a teacher of history and we all know what happened in the past," says retired school teacher Britt-Marie Aspenlind.

"Jews have contributed greatly to Malmö but they haven’t been given enough support by politicians who aren't taking the anti-Semitism problem seriously enough."

Also along on the walk is Katarina Egfors, a Vicar in the Church of Sweden.

"It’s very important for all of us to come together and show solidarity with the Jewish community in Malmö. We are all entitled to have our beliefs respected," she says. [....]

Statistics released earlier this year by the Swedish Crime Prevention Council (Brottsförebyggande rådet, Brå) revealed that of the 44 anti-Semitic hate crimes reported in Malmö in 2010 and 2011 not a single one made it to a prosecutor.

And for the total of 480 hate crimes reported in Malmö during the same period, there were zero convictions.

[JW: Those figures appear to suggest that whereas Jews constitute half of 1% of the population of Malmo (1,500 out of 300,000 = .5%), anti-semitic hate crimes amounted to about 9% of all reported hate crimes.]

[....] For the Jews that choose to remain in Malmö, there have been attempts made to build bridges with the city’s large Muslim population. While Israel and its policies remain a hot topic of debate, both communities seem to have at least found some common ground.

Sieradski has met privately with a local imam who said afterward that "we should dance with the Jews in the streets".

"I was quite blunt with him," Sieradski says of his meeting with the imam.

"I said that if you don’t want to support Israel then hug us and make us feel welcome in Malmö. What is happening now is that many kids are becoming Zionists and see Israel as they only place where they can be.

"If you really want to achieve what you want then don’t hate us. Hatred just makes us stronger and more tied together. He agreed with me as many Muslim leaders see the problems too."

The efforts on the part of Malmö's Jewish leaders appear to be bearing fruit with a young Malmö Muslim, Siavosh Derakhti, who was given an award last autumn by the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism.

Derakhti, a 21-year-old son of Iranian immigrants who has lived in Malmö his entire life, was recognized for setting up the organization Young Muslims Against Anti-Semitism to educate students about the Holocaust.

[JW: I can't help reflecting that, according to all available evidence, Iranians in Iran—I mean the bulk of the population, not the lunatics who happen to be ruling the country—are significantly less anti-semitic, and less hysterically hostile to Israel, than almost any other population in the Islamic Middle East. That may well be true of Iranians in Sweden, too.]

"Jews in Malmö are subjected to everything from threats to harassment and it's our duty as Swedish citizens and residents of Malmö to react and stand up for human rights," Derakhti wrote in a recent opinion article in the local Sydsvenskan newspaper. [....]

Sounds good to me.

—Jeff Weintraub

Military stalemate and social meltdown in Syria

Here are three takes on the unfolding tragedy in Syria that come at if from somewhat different perspectives but converge on the same basic story.

=> Some reflections by Paul Danahar, the BBC Middle East bureau chief:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said that in a guerrilla war the rebels only had to not lose to win; however, unless a regular army was clearly winning, it was losing. The Syrian crisis has, for the time being, turned that maxim on its head.

When the uprising began, the West and its allies in the Gulf expected it to last weeks or maybe months - but not years.

Now, by hanging on this long, the regime in Damascus increasingly thinks that by not losing it is winning.

That new confidence - along with what is believed to be a steady supply of arms from its supporters in Iran and Russia - is helping the regime to take back some areas which it had previously lost.  [....]

The situation in Syria is complicated. If you are not confused by what is going on there, then you do not understand it.  [....]

Having spent the last few days in Beirut and Damascus, talking to the international community, Western diplomats, FSA activists and Syrian regime supporters, it is clear that nobody knows how to end this crisis.

That's just about the only thing all sides agree on.  [....]

The only thing that is certain in Syria is who is losing: The Syrian people are losing. They are losing their lives, their homes, their wealth. Their children are losing their childhoods.  [....]

The Syrians are also losing Syria, because the longer this goes on the more society is losing what little sense of identity it has.

"The country is moving from a political crisis to a societal crisis," is how one of the few genuinely knowledgeable people trying to manage this crisis explained events here to me.

This societal crisis is manifesting itself in steadily increasing small acts of sectarian violence.

All across the country, every day, there are brutal events, none of which in itself is big enough to warrant the attention of international or local media, but each of which breaks another strand of this country's fragile weave of sects and religions.

Each one is an act of revenge for an offence committed by another member of the victim's religious community.

Women are being raped because they are Sunni or Alawite and their men are assumed to be involved in the fighting.

Christian women are being hauled off buses and attacked by Salafist fighters for not covering their hair.

Murders lead to revenge massacres. [....]

The Syrian war is turning into a sectarian conflict whose influence will spill beyond the country's borders.

There was the chance at the beginning to stop that being the case. That chance has been lost.

Whether or not that chance was there at the beginning is a major question, now difficult to answer confidently in retrospect.  But what's clear is that the longer this bloodbath goes on, the harder it becomes to imagine Syria's different communities trusting each other enough to live together comfortably in the foreseeable future—or ever.

=>  At the same time, it's important not to base our analyses of the present catastrophe in Syria on misleading pictures of Syrian society and politics before the current violence began in 2011.  Those misleading pictures come in various forms, peddled over the years and now recycled by both supporters and critics of the Assad regime.  But one common theme, shared by "anti-imperialist" fans of the Assad dictatorship and many gullible "realists" and "progressives" in more mainstream western circles, involved painting an excessively rosy picture of inter-sectarian co-existence, even cosmopolitan harmony, under the Assad regime.

Richard Spencer, a Middle East correspondent for the Daily Telegraph based in Cairo, asks the question bluntly:  Was Syria ever the secular, non-sectarian state we are led to believe it was? The quick answer would be no. The more extended answer still adds up to no, but in a somewhat complex way.

[....]  Throughout the conflict, I've read journalists and experts write about the Syria of "before" as a "secular" state, where people weren't particularly religious, where women wandered the streets at night alone, and hipsters drank in western bars and nightclubs. All sects and ethnicities mixed happily. There's a kernel of truth there but it's misleading, and it's aggravated by the fact that the worst offenders, whether pro- or anti-regime, or somewhere in the middle, are often those foreigners who know the country best:  after all, they lived and worked, studied Arabic and socialised, largely in smart areas of Aleppo and Damascus where those statements are more likely to be true. Even The Economist, which in the current edition has an excellent and gloomy overview of the mess Syria is in, falls into this trap, talking nostalgically of the time Muslims and Christians lived side by side in peace as church bells and muezzins filled the air over Damascus's Old City. Few of the original protesters were very devout, it says.

What this neglects is that a large part of Syria – largely the parts that have driven the revolution – were not so visible to the outsider. From my experience (even much earlier in the war) of provincial towns and villages, they were often divided by faith, with "shia villages" separate from "Sunni" and "Christian" ones. That doesn't mean they didn't get on, but everyone knew who was who. Likewise, in these places, you certainly don't see young women "hanging out". A general form of segregation is observed in Sunni areas – male journalists put up in local houses kept well apart from the women – and young men pray diligently and regularly.

[JW: And here is a crucial and perceptive point. My bolding:]

Moreover, while few talked openly about the sectarian divide before the revolution, that may have been because it was so important, not because it was unimportant. Nearly half a century of Baath party had totally inverted the historic sectarian order, in which Alawites (the sect of the Assads) were at the bottom of the pile, with the sect's leaders now occupying the key positions of state, and controlling much of its wealth. The effects of the Alawites' change of fortune were felt particularly in places like Homs and Hama, where poor Alawites were given land and encouraged to move, setting up the horrible sectarian clashes that have emerged in these areas.

Moreover, the regime, while claiming to be "secular", played a strange game of footsie with radical Islamists, not only allowing al-Qaeda to operate from and through the country in its highly sectarian attacks in neighbouring Iraq, but also allowing and encouraging some Islamist groups that it thought could be a counterweight to its great historical enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, that bizarre hypocrisy has now turned round to bite. Jabhat al-Nusra's core is Syrian men who fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Among the revolution's most powerful leaders on the ground, Abdulqader Saleh al-Hajji, known as "Hajji Marea", head of the most powerful Brigade in Aleppo, the Tawhid, and vice-head of the revolutionary command council, was before the war a missionary for Dawa, a state-backed Sunni evangelical group, and travelled widely, including to Islamist-full Dagestan. ("Tawhid" itself, which means Unity, in a religious context refers to the "Oneness" of God and, in politics, to the importance of an Islamist, not secular state – division of religion and state clearly being an offence to Oneness.)

There is no doubt that the jihadists of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are sponsored by salafis in the Gulf and full of foreign fighters, and it serves both pro- and anti-regime forces well to emphasise this, the former to cast the revolution in the most hideous light it can, the latter to say that the revolution's Islamism is imported from Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist places. It's also true to say, with the latter, that the "Islamism" is growing, and to a considerable extent because of the West's failure to back the rebels with weapons and other military support. But in fact the demand for a more religious society is indigenous to large parts of Syria, as it is to Egypt and other Middle Eastern states that have been in the grip of "secular" (actually, just hypocritical) dictatorships. For provincial types, "secular" has come to mean flashy, worldly, corrupt and finally brutal, and for them Sharia means a more honest and decent society, as much as anything else. This is not a good thing – I wouldn't want to be an ambitious young woman growing up in Syria today, or one of the many perfectly decent, god-fearing middle-aged Muslim men I know who like a quiet tipple of Scotch before bedtime – but they will be victims of the dictators' dishonesty and refusal to reform as much as of Saudi fundamentalists.

This does not of course help the outside world, whether the "West" or Russia or Iran or the UN, decide what it wants to do about the mess. The White House is said to be reconsidering its opposition to arming the "good rebels", though what that means when Hajji Marea, officially a "good" rebel, is in open alliance with the "bad" Jabhat al-Nusra, is hard to say. But it is worth recalling once again that both Washington and Moscow might never have faced this dilemma were it not for years of support for horrible regimes that it mistakenly thought were at least non-sectarian and secular.

Actually, during the roughly three decades that Syria has been ruled by the Ba'athist regime headed by the Assad family, many analysts sympathetic to that regime—and there have been quite a few, ranging from sober scholars to shameless apologists—put this argument the other way around:  the Assad dictatorship may have been brutal and repressive, but only a brutal and despotic regime could keep the lid on such an explosive society.  I never sympathized with those analyses, though they did have a grain of truth, as we can see now that the lid has blown off.  But the two major problems with that perspective were (a) that it was always unrealistic to imagine that this 'solution' of despotic multi-culturalism could be maintained indefinitely under conditions of modern mass politics and ideology and (b) that the Assad regime, like many other despotic regimes, maintained and intensified the very conditions that made its despotic rule 'necessary'.  We can see the results.

=>  And to sum things up, here are some passages from a New York Times article on Thursday whose title captures the gist of the story: "Syria Begins to Break Apart Under Pressure From War".

One intriguing suggestion, put forward by analysts quoted in this article, is that Assad and his regime have largely given up trying to regain control over significant portions of Syria, at least for the moment—but the result is that they actually feel more, not less, secure about their position in the parts of the country they do control.

The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.

 After more than two years of conflict, Syria is breaking up. A constellation of armed groups battling to advance their own agendas are effectively creating the outlines of separate armed fiefs. As the war expands in scope and brutality, its biggest casualty appears to be the integrity of the Syrian state.

[JW:  What the writer really means is the coherence of Syria as a nation.  It is often misleading to conflate the concepts of  "state" and "nation", too easily yoked together in the term "nation-state", and in situations like this it's especially misleading.]

On Thursday, President Obama met in Washington with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and once again pressed the idea of a top-down diplomatic solution. That approach depends on the rebels and the government agreeing to meet at a peace conference that was announced last week by the United States and Russia.  [....]  But as evidence of massacres and chemical weapons mounts, experts and Syrians themselves say the American focus on change at the top ignores the deep fractures the war has caused in Syrian society. Increasingly, it appears Syria is so badly shattered that no single authority is likely to be able to pull it back together any time soon.

Instead, three Syrias are emerging: one loyal to the government, to Iran and to Hezbollah; one dominated by Kurds with links to Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iraq; and one with a Sunni majority that is heavily influenced by Islamists and jihadis.

“It is not that Syria is melting down — it has melted down,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of “In the Lion’s Den: An Eyewitness Account of Washington’s Battle with Syria.”

“So much has changed between the different parties that I can’t imagine it all going back into one piece,” Mr. Tabler said.

Fueling the country’s breakup are the growing brutality of fighters on all sides and the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence. [....]

As the momentum seesaws back and forth between rebels and the government, the geographic divisions are hardening.

After steadily losing territory to rebels during the first two years of the conflict, government forces have progressed on a number of key fronts in recent weeks, routing rebel forces in the southern province of Dara’a, outside Damascus and in the central city of Homs and its surrounding villages.

These victories not only reflect strategic shifts by government forces but also could further solidify the country’s divisions.

Since mass defections of mostly conscripted soldiers shrank the government’s forces earlier in the uprising, it has largely given up on trying to reclaim parts of the country far from the capital, said Joseph Holliday, a fellow with the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

Instead, the government has focused on solidifying its grip on a strip of land that extends from the capital, Damascus, in the south, up to Homs in the country’s center and west to the coastal area heavily populated by Mr. Assad’s sect, the Alawites.

Other than hitting them with airstrikes or artillery, Mr. Assad has made little effort to reclaim rebel-held areas in the country’s far north and east.

The character of those fighting for Mr. Assad has changed, too. As the uncommitted defected, the loyalists remained. “All of these defections and desertions basically created a more loyal and therefore more deployable core,” said Emile Hokayem, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who is based in Dubai. “At least you know who is fighting for you."

Mr. Assad has also come to rely more heavily on paramilitary militias that draw largely from his Alawite sect and other minorities who consider him a bulwark against the rebels’ Islamism. More recently, fighters from Lebanon’s Shiite militant group Hezbollah have added extra muscle, especially in the border region near the town of Qusair, an area dotted with Shiite and Sunni villages that has seen intense fighting in recent months.  [....]

Although the Obama administration and its allies share the rebels’ goal of removing Mr. Assad from power, they have little else in common with the many rebel brigades that define their struggle in Islamic terms and seek to replace Mr. Assad with an Islamic state. Among them is Jabhet al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, the local branch of Al Qaeda, which the United States has blacklisted as a terrorist group.

The war’s duration and the competition for resources have left the rebel movement itself deeply fractured. Few effective links exist between the rebels’ exile leader, Gen. Salim Idris, and the most powerful groups on the ground.

And recent months have seen increasing fights among rebels, diminishing their ability to form a united front against the government. [....]

In Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh Province, the country’s largest Kurdish majority area, residents have taken in Kurds fleeing violence elsewhere, expanded the teaching of the Kurdish language in schools and raised militias that have clashed with rebel brigades. Many local Kurds are linked to groups in Turkey and Iraq and hope to use the uprising to push for greater autonomy.

These spreading fissures leave little optimism that Syria can be stitched back together under one leadership in the near future.  [....]

That assessment doesn't seem implausible, though it's still to early to say for sure.  And if the dynamics of ethno-sectarian polarization and fragmentation in Syria really have passed the point of no return, that still doesn't tell us what the form the practical consequences will take.  They could range from merely terrible to horrifyingly catastrophic, with various possibilities in between.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, I want to emphasize that none of these complexities and forebodings necessarily add up to a case for just wringing our hands and doing nothing.  There are good reasons to be cautious and careful, but it's also important to bear in mind that the longer this goes on, the worse the outcomes are likely to be—for Syrians, for the region, and probably for the rest of us.

—Jeff Weintraub

Peggy Noonan goes Krugman (Hendrik Hertzberg)

I rarely pay much attention to Peggy Noonan, the one-time White House speech-writer who is now a Wall Street Journal columnist and talk-show pundit.  In my (possibly fallible) opinion, her stuff is almost always fatuous blather, occasionally enlivened by a clever turn of phrase.  But some people apparently take her seriously, and I have occasionally been startled to hear otherwise intelligent individuals tell me that they find her columns plausible and illuminating.  Noonan clearly has a flair for churning out relentlessly partisan hack propaganda while making it sound moderate, reasonable, and even thoughtful.  That's a real skill.

If one takes the trouble to look carefully at the substance of her arguments (when they have substance, rather than consisting entirely of atmospherics), they often turn out to be factually inaccurate, logically fallacious, or both.  And it's not uncommon to see her make assertions that turn reality completely upside-down.  Rather than waste time wondering what is going through her mind when she does this or how she thinks she can get away with it—is she really that clueless, or is she being cleverly hypocritical?—we should begin with the fact that she generally does get away with it and consider what Noonan's inversions of reality might tell us, symptomatically, about current political discourse.  Perhaps they represent coded, or half-conscious, recognitions of politically inconvenient realities from the very heart of right-wing conventional wisdom?  If so, maybe they're significant signs of something?

That seems to be a hypothesis that Hendrik Hertzberg is toying with, at least, in his recent evisceration of a column by Noonan that went on and on with her standard anti-Obama rant and then, in the process, slipped in this startling admission:  "It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis."

Why is that a startling admission, why is Noonan's framing of this admission so misleading and hypocritical, and why might it nevertheless be significant?  Let Hertzberg explain:

[....] The column tries to disguise itself as yet another right-wing attack on the Journal’s default punching bag, President Obama. Under a pugnacious headline and subhead—

THE ANTI-CONFIDENCE MAN
Just when America needs a boost, we’re stuck with Dr. Doom in the White House

—Noonan takes some mock-mournful jabs at the President (he’s “aloof,” his efforts are “cosmetic,” he “speaks constantly, endlessly, but always seems to be withholding his true thoughts and plans”), at what she calls “the mood of his governance” (“full of warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings, full of words like suffering and punishment and sacrifice”), and at “the President’s people” (their “whole approach” is “stoke and scare—stoke resentment and scare the vulnerable”).

[JW: Coming from a Republican propagandist, this complaint about constant "warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings" and a general atmosphere of scare-mongering and gratuitously manufactured crises is pretty rich.]

But her heresies are too big for such fig leaves, and they begin with her startling opening line:

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis.

Say what? The biggest argument in Washington is about which is more urgent, the unemployment problem or the deficit and debt problem. Democrats say it’s unemployment and therefore advocate stimulus, which causes an increase in the deficit (though not necessarily in the long-term debt). Republicans say it’s the deficit/debt and therefore advocate austerity, which causes an increase in unemployment. (To be fair, Republicans are willing to swallow a bit of stimulus as long as it takes the dubious form of lowering taxes on the rich.)

Noonan, despite a quick “to be sure” aside in which she avers that things like deficits, regulations, and “the federal tax code” are “part of” the problem, is clear about which side she’s on:

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

For Noonan, “everywhere you look” is a hotel she stayed at in Pittsburgh, which was so understaffed there was no bellhop to walk her up to her room in case a criminal was lurking. Nevertheless, about “the central thing,” she, like Paul Krugman, is right (i.e., left).

She’s also right about what Obama should have done about it:

He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care.

Here’s where I started getting dizzy. Noonan is describing exactly what Obama did do. He did see a jobs crisis four years ago. As a major part of his eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus package (which he pursued in addition to, not instead of, health care), he did go for public-works projects, specifically including bridges and a strengthened power grid. The only opposition to all that bridge-building and grid-strengthening came from Noonan’s party. In the House, zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, three did. Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter jumped from the G.O.P. before he was pushed. (Repackaging himself as a Democrat did not keep him from landing with a splat.) Olympia Snowe, citing hyperpartisanship and legislative dysfunction, retired. Her Maine colleague Susan Collins, the last RINO in the Senate zoo, may or may not seek a fourth term.

[JW: And let us not forget—as Noonan and many other pundits seem to have completely forgotten—that in September 2011, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama once again proposed a serious and substantial jobs plan that included major spending on public works.  Predictably, this proposal ran into a stone wall of opposition from Congressional Republicans and went nowhere.]

From Peggy’s peroration:

Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it…. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs. Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.

Noonan is with Obama, or Obama is with Noonan, on the substance of jobs vs. deficits. “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” the President said last week in an interview on ABC, adding: “My goal is how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we’re going to be bringing in more revenue.” I guess she has to say it’s all Obama’s fault. It’s the Wall Street Journal. It’s Chinatown.

OK, Noonan is being deceptive and hypocritical. But as de Rouchefoucauld pointed out long ago, hypocrisy is often the homage that vice pays to virtue. So we should take what we can get and go on from there.

The policy recommendation that Noonan is offering here—and has intermittently alluded to over the past few years—is basically on-target, even if Noonan feels compelled to bury it in such a dishonest and misleading rhetorical package: "It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis." We should be taking serious measures to help pull the economy out of the Great Recession and to bring down unemployment—rather than following the contractionary economic policies pushed by the Republicans in the US and their counterparts in Europe, which have sabotaged the economic recovery and continue to do so. And one major element in a constructive program would be to employ (or re-employ) construction workers, engineers, and lots of other people to start rebuilding, repairing, updating, and otherwise strengthening our national infrastructure. Republicans, you heard it from Peggy Noonan!

—Jeff Weintraub

From the Spanish civil war in the 1930s to Syria's civil war today – Michael Petrou explains the fallacies of "non-intervention"

I confess that I don't have any confident opinions about how the US and other western countries should be responding to the civil war in Syria, which has now been raging over two years and seems likely to keep escalating for the foreseeable future.  That's especially true because it's hard to be optimistic about a non-terrible outcome whatever the US does or doesn't do.  But the longer this bloodbath goes on, with its accumulating toll of inter-sectarian atrocities, the harder it is to imagine putting Syria's different communities back together again in a unified nation when the war is over.

To further complicate matters, this struggle can't be seen as a simple conflict between good guys and bad guys (as I noted last month).  The Assad regime is definitely a brutal, repressive, and murderous dictatorship that deserves little sympathy, but there are plenty of bad guys among the rebels, too.  The opposition to the Assad regime is not a unified movement with clear common goals, but a diverse collection of armed and unarmed tendencies with quite different agendas, who are being supported, funded, armed, and in some cases directly reinforced by outside forces that also have conflicting agendas. Those outside actors include not only governments (including those of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, counterposed to governments like those of Iran and Russia that are heavily backing Assad), but also increasing numbers of trans-national Sunni jihadists (to match the Hizbullah fighters from Lebanon and Iranian Revolutionary Guards operating in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime). And the longer the fighting has gone on, the bigger the role of radical Islamist fighters on the anti-Assad side.

=> On the other hand, it is possible to say with some confidence that a lot of the arguments being thrown around in the public debates about Syria are misleading, fallacious, misinformed, and/or based on false or questionable premises.  In particular, wwhile there are plenty of serious, intelligent, and plausible arguments to be made against US involvement in the crisis—even in ways that fall far short of military intervention—many of those arguing against US involvement fail confront, or even notice, the fact that in some circumstances inaction can itself be a form of action, with real and important consequences.  Circumstances of that sort might include a civil war in which other outside forces are already very heavily involved in backing, supplying, and arming one side or another—or particular factions within one side.  And that happens to be the situation with respect to Syria right now.

Historical analogies are always imperfect and need to be handled with care, but sometimes they can be illuminating.  Over the past several decades I've had several occasions to think about analogies to the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, when the western democracies followed a policy of "non-intervention" while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy massively supported the Franco forces with arms, equipment, ground forces, and air power.  The result of this one-sided "non-intervention" policy was that the Spanish Republicans were starved for arms; were forced into dependence on the Soviet Union, which greatly augmented its influence in Spain as a result; and were eventually defeated, leading to the imposition of the Franco dictatorship.

During most of the Bosnian war in the early 1990s, in a bizarre partial replay of that script from the 1930s, the US and most European countries enforced a supposedly 'comprehensive' embargo against arms sales to both the Bosnian Serb militia and the Bosnian government.  This simply meant that one side, the Bosnian Serbs, was massively supplied by Serbia and had all the heavy weapons, whereas the Bosnian Muslims were starved for arms, slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and even (to a slight degree) forced to accept assistance from trans-national jihadis.  In the end, it took long-delayed NATO intervention (in collaboration with Croatia, which seized the opportunity to expel the entire ethnic Serb population from its Krajina region) to bring the bloodbath in Bosnia to an end.  But by that time, the different ethnic communities had become so polarized, traumatized, and mutually distrustful that it was almost impossible to reconstitute a viable and coherent Bosnia. (Saying "almost" impossible may be euphemistic, but I don't want to foreclose the possibility completely.  At all events, it hasn't happened so far. I am fairly confident that a NATO intervention in the early stages of the conflict, in 1992, would have saved tens or hundreds of thousands of lives; and by preventing the worst horrors that actually occurred, it might also have made a constructive settlement less impossible.)

The pattern of selective and uneven "non-intervention" in Syria today brings the Spanish analogy even more strongly to mind, since the civil war in Syria, like the Spanish civil war, has become a proxy war in which a whole range of outside actors, from the region and beyond, are heavily involved—and a lot of them are supporting the worst and most dangerous forces within Syria, either the Assad regime or the most radical Sunni Islamists among the rebels.  It might be argued that those are the only two realistic options, and that one of those forces is bound to come out on top in the end—or, at least, that involvement by the US and European governments is unlikely to make any positive or constructive difference.  Perhaps that's true.  But it's also possible (as Karim Sadjadpour and Trudy Rubin, among others, have suggested) that we need to consider seriously whether there are any viable alternatives to the Assad regime and the Sunni jihadists, how viable those alternatives are, whether US support ant assistance might strengthen their position, and whether it's a good idea to simply abandon the situation to the two most unpleasant forces and their foreign backers.

=>  I have been meaning to write something about the fallacies of western "non-intervention" in Syria today, and their analogies to the fallacies of western "non-intervention" in the Spanish civil war.  But I see (thanks to a tip from my comrade Terry Glavin) that Michael Petrou has already done a first-rate job of it, in a piece titled Homage to Latakia: Comparing Syria and the Spanish Civil War.

I might quibble with a few formulations in Petrou's first four paragraphs.  But everything he says in the following passage is on-target and important:

[....]  Another lesson from Spain, for those who choose to look, concerns the fallacy of non-intervention. That was the policy adopted by the democracies — including Canada — in 1936, when the Spanish general Francisco Franco, backed by his allies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, launched a rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected government that eventually toppled it and enslaved the country.

We said it was a Spanish conflict, a civil war, and should be decided by the Spaniards. It wasn’t. The democracies might not have intervened, but other powers did. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany picked one side; Stalinist Soviet Union picked the other.

When the war began, the Communists were a minor force within Spain’s republican coalition. Then Spain’s presumed democratic friends deserted it, while the Soviet Union sent weapons and men. Soviet and Spanish Communist power consequently grew. By 1937, the Soviet NKVD and its Spanish allies ran secret jails in Madrid where they murdered political opponents from amongst their supposed anti-fascist comrades.

Which brings us to Syria. It’s been two years, some 80,000 deaths, and hundreds of thousands of displaced. What began as a democratic uprising has become a civil war. Those against doing anything about it have cycled through various arguments, all of which miss a basic point. Non-intervention isn’t an option, because intervention is already happening. Saying you’re against intervention in Syria is like standing in the middle of a blizzard and saying you’re against snow.

The Iranians are backing dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that usually concerns itself with rocketing Israel or preparing for the same, has dispatched fighters to Assad. The opposition is a diverse group, but what seems clear is that that the Salafi Islamists among them are gaining strength. Of course they are. For two years, they’ve been getting money and support from Gulf Arab states, while more the more moderate factions fighting Assad have received basically nothing the West.

Oh, maybe that’s not fair. The United States is sending “non-lethal” aid, because when it comes to knocking a strafing MiG jet fighter out of the sky, nothing beats a pair of night vision goggles. Canada is footing the bill for some refugees’ tents. Maybe we’ll speed up the refugee process for Syrians fleeing Assad. It’s not exactly a stirring expression of solidarity: “Your struggle is our struggle, and after you lose it, we’ll help you find an apartment in Mississauga.” John Baird should stitch that on a banner and march under it the next time he visits the Middle East.

But at least all this sitting on our hands has given time for a more coherent isolationist pitch to take shape. After years of fretting about the nature of opposition, now it does look a lot more unsavoury than when the war began. Our timidity has become a self-reinforcing excuse. Non-intervention weakened the hands of Spanish democrats, and it does the same to Syrian ones.

And although the assessment that Petrou offers in this conclusion may or may not turn out to be overly optimistic, it deserves careful pondering:

It didn’t have to be this way. We could have backed our natural Syrian allies when they were stronger. Doing so is now more complicated and difficult but still necessary. After two years, it’s a fair assumption that even if Western intelligence agencies are befuddled by the exact makeup of the opposition, the Turks and Jordanians probably have a pretty good idea. The more moderate elements of the opposition should be identified and given the weapons they need to prevail. There are escalating options on top of this: a protected safe haven on the ground; air strikes; a no-fly zone. The Syrian rebels have not asked for foreign troops, and I’m not suggesting we offer them. But a negotiated peace is not imminent. This war will end when one side wins. If we care about the outcome, we should be willing to shape it.

—Jeff Weintraub

Escalating atrocities and counter-atrocities in an increasingly ugly Syrian civil war

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tried to do careful and systematic estimates of the mounting death toll in Syria based on authenticated reports, just revised its total body count to "at least 94,000", including both combatants and civilians.   But according to Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the Observatory, "We believe the real figure of those killed from both sides is above 120,000 because both sides are being discreet on their casualties."

Meanwhile, the ongoing dynamic of this non-stop violence continues to intensify inter-group hatreds and generate increasingly brutal and sadistic atrocities, in a manner familiar from other civil wars. A key consequence, and sometimes even a deliberate goal, of atrocities in such conflicts is to polarize different communities and solidify their mutual fears and antagonisms.  It works, as the bloodbaths in Bosnia and Iraq (among others) demonstrated quite vividly.  The longer this goes on, the harder it will be be to put Syrian society back together—to the extent that remains possible.

Two snapshots:

=>  A massacre of Sunni villagers in Baniyas.  From the New York Times:

This graphic video posted online shows 20 members of one family, including nine children, said to have been killed by government forces in al-Bayda, a village in the Baniyas district. Rebels said the government killed at least 322 Sunnis in Baniyas last week, and hundreds are missing. This video shows dead women and children in a darkened room. One woman's body is surrounded by five children, while another woman's head slumps back, a baby on her shoulder. The cameraman repeats, "Oh God, oh God."

What We Know

Witnesses and activists said that government forces swept through Sunni areas in the Baniyas district last week and killed hundreds of people, in what appeared to be a sectarian attack. Baniyas is on the coast, the traditional home of the minority Alawite sect, to which President Assad belongs.

What We Don't Know

Hundreds of people remain missing in Baniyas, and we do not know what happened to them. We do not know the total number of people killed in the violence there last week. We do not know the explicit motivation for the attack or the number of people from each sect who may have been killed.

=> An atrocity video of a Syrian rebel commander mutilating the body of a dead government soldier, brandishing his heart and other entrails, and taking a bite out of them.

From Time, May 12:

[....]  In the video a man who is believed to be a rebel commander named Khalid al-Hamad, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Sakkar, bends over the government soldier, knife in hand.  [....]  According to two of Abu Sakkar’s fellow rebels, who said they were present at the scene, Abu Sakkar had cut the organs out of the man’s body.  [....]  “I swear we will eat from your hearts and livers, you dogs of Bashar,” he says, referring to supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Off camera, a small crowd can be heard calling out “Allahu akbar” — God is great. Then the man raises one of the bloodied organs to his lips and starts to tear off a chunk with his teeth.

Two TIME reporters first saw the video in April in the presence of several of Abu Sakkar’s fighters and supporters, including his brother. They all said the video was authentic. We later obtained a copy. Since then TIME has been trying to ensure that the footage is not digitally manipulated in any way — a faked film like this would be powerful propaganda for the regime, which portrays the rebels as terrorists — and, as yet, TIME has not been able to confirm its integrity.  [....]  The video became public on May 12 when it was posted online by a proregime group and is indeed now being used as propaganda by regime supporters (and has already been shared 1,115 times on Facebook and has over 46,000 views on YouTube). These 27 seconds of footage provide a glimpse at how brutal the Syrian war has become — and a startling example of how technology appears to be fueling that brutality.

Time, May 14:

News sites around the world have shown Khalid al-Hamad sink his teeth into what appears to be the lung of a dead Syrian government soldier. His fellow rebels have called for him to be arrested or killed for the act. Human-rights groups have condemned him. But al-Hamad has no regrets.

In an interview conducted via Skype in the early hours of May 14, al-Hamad explained to TIME what caused him to cut out the soldier’s organs: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.”

The video, a 27-second clip in which al-Hamad brandishes organs that appear to be the lungs and heart of the Syrian soldier who lies dead at al-Hamad’s feet, was first seen by two TIME reporters in April.  [....]  Al-Hamad has now confirmed that the video is real, and that he did indeed take a bite of the soldier’s lung. (At the time of filming, al-Hamad believed he was biting into the liver. A surgeon who has seen the video confirms that the organ in question was a lung, which somewhat resembles the liver).

Al-Hamad, who is Sunni and harbors a sectarian hatred for Alawite Muslims, said he has another gruesome video of his killing a government soldier from the Alawite faith. (Syrian President Bashar Assad is Alawite; the conflict in Syria is increasingly sectarian.) “Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing another shabiha [progovernment militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.”
Al-Hamad also explained that even though both sides of the conflict in Syria are using video clips of their own brutal actions to intimidate the other, he believes his clip would have particular impact on the regime’s troops. “They film as well, but after what I did hopefully they will never step into the area where Abu Sakkar is,” he said, using his nom de guerre and referring to the part of Syria he currently controls.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), which validated the video, released a report on May 13 identifying al-Hamad as a well-known commander responsible for the recent cross-border shelling of a Shi‘ite Lebanese village that killed two. The organization called on the U.N. Security Council to refer the Syria situation to the International Criminal Court to ensure accountability for all war crimes and crimes against humanity. “It is not enough for Syria’s opposition to condemn such behavior or blame it on violence by the government,” said Nadim Houry, HRW’s deputy director for the Middle East. “The opposition forces need to act firmly to stop such abuses.”

Al-Hamad lashed out at HRW and the U.N. for focusing on opposition abuses when the regime is responsible for similar atrocities. During the interview, he sent links to YouTube videos purporting to show regime abuses. “Why doesn’t the U.N. make an appeal for the shabiha not to do that? The shabiha themselves posted a million clips of them stabbing and raping."

Al-Hamad [....] indicated that the brutality of the regime had driven him to extremes. “You are not seeing what we are seeing, and you are not living what we are living. Where are my brothers, my friends, the girls of my neighborhood who were raped? May God bless them all.”

The Supreme Military Council, which according to the leadership oversees about 90% of the fighting groups in Syria, has issued a poster — circulated on Facebook — calling for al-Hamad’s arrest, saying it wants him “dead or alive.” In response, supporters have posted stylized portraits of al-Hamad cradling a rifle. “We Love You,” reads the inscription.

Al-Hamad pointed out in the interview that the revolution started as a peaceful uprising more than two years ago. “[The Alawites] were the ones who killed our children in Baba Amr and raped our women,” he said, referring to the site of a ferocious battle in the city of Homs that took place in February 2012. Then, referring to the recent massacre of Sunni villagers near the coastal village of Baniyas that has been attributed by rebel groups to the regime, he adds, “They were the ones who slaughtered the children and women in Bayda [near Baniyas]. We didn’t start it, they started it.” He swore to avenge every death. “Our slogan is: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

—Jeff Weintraub

How national movements can be suicidal – A lesson from Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka

It is not uncommon for ultra-nationalist movements and regimes to lead their own people into catastrophe.  (Think of Milosevic and Radovan Karadjic, just for a start, and plenty of other examples should come to mind.)  But the fate of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka has been especially tragic in this regard.  This Sunday's New York Times carried a powerful and moving piece by Aatish Taseer on the devastation left behind by the decades-long war for an independent "Tamil Eeelam", now utterly defeated.  That devastation is not just material, but also cultural and moral and psychological, one might almost say existential.  And in important ways this devastation was, in part, self-inflicted – or, more precisely, brought down on the Sri Lankan Tamils by the movement that claimed to be leading them, representing their aspirations, and acting on their behalf.

(Saying that, I should add, is in no way intended to excuse or whitewash the mass atrocities committed by the Sri Lankan government and its armed forces in the course of the civil war, nor the repression that continues in its aftermath.)

Taseer's piece, "A People Without a Story", is worth reading in full.  But here is the heart of his argument:

Four years ago this week, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam announced that their struggle for an independent homeland in northern Sri Lanka had “reached its bitter end.” The group had been fighting on behalf of the Tamil people for more than a quarter-century, and its defeat was absolute.

Today, great sections of Tamil country are still a scene of devastation. The houses are either destroyed or brand-new; the land is uncultivated and overgrown; there are forests of decapitated Palmyra palms, damaged by heavy shelling. And then there are the relics of war — graveyards of L.T.T.E. vehicles rotting in the open air; the remains of a ship, its superstructure blown to pieces and in whose rusting starboard a gaping hole gives on to blue sea.

When I first arrived there last March, I saw the loss in primarily military terms. But the feeling of defeat among the Tamils of Sri Lanka goes far deeper than the material defeat of the rebels. It is a moral and psychological defeat.  [....]

For the truth is that the Tamil defeat has less to do with the vanquishing of the L.T.T.E. by the Sri Lankan Army and much more to do with the self-wounding (“suicidal” would not be too strong a word) character of the movement itself. The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation were seen as betrayal.

One evening, soon after I arrived in Jaffna, the capital of the northern province, I had dinner at the house of a woman whose sister had been part of a circle of academics who had published a book in 1990 called “The Broken Palmyra.” The book was, by no means, a simple polemic against the Tigers; it was an academic work that, in trying to be evenhanded, had taken account of both government and L.T.T.E. atrocities. But this was too treasonous for Mr. Prabhakaran, and my host’s sister was killed even before the book went to print.

[....]  There was the Muslim woman who, along with all the other Muslim families of Jaffna, had, one morning in 1990, been summoned to a school compound and given two hours to leave the city of her birth. They were told to leave behind their valuables and the deeds to their houses. When they asked why they were being expelled, they were told that they were lucky not to be killed. Then they were loaded into lorries and escorted to the border of the district.  [....]

[In the final showdown in 2009], it was Mr. Prabhakaran’s express strategy to retreat with an enormous civilian population — 300,000 people, some say — and to use them as a human shield against the advancing army. It was his intention to let so many Tamils die that the international community (read, the West) would be forced to intervene, and the Tamils would be granted their homeland.

But here he made a grave mistake: he either overestimated his own importance; or else, the West’s sense of decency. For the West, occupied with problems more pressing, let as many Tamils die as had to die for the war to be won.

[JW:  Actually, focusing so exclusively on "the West" here is misleading, and an uncharacteristic lapse into cliché. By the end, the Sri Lankan Tamils were so isolated that the Sri Lankan government was receiving arms and active support from a remarkably wide range of non-western governments, including countries like India and Pakistan that agree on little else, along with China and Russia and so on. And the UN "Human Rights" Council rushed to pass a resolution commending the Sri Lankan government on its final victory and congratulating it for its "continued commitment" to "the promotion and protection of all human rights", even as the UNHRC staff on the ground were sending back reports about war crimes and other mass atrocities on both sides.  For what it's worth, western governments represented on the UNHRC voted to condemn and investigate both the government and the Tigers.]

This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them than to anyone else. [....]

The north of Sri Lanka today is a spectacle of Sinhalese triumphalism. A victorious army is rebuilding new roads, grabbing land for itself (6,000 acres, rumor has it), and displaying the spoils of war before tourists from the south.

Even when the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa acts magnanimously toward the Tamil people, by building new infrastructure projects, for instance, the Tamils seem to feel that their defeat is being rubbed in their faces. And they are not wrong.  [....]

They are now a people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare  [....]

There are lessons here that self-styled "revolutionary" and "resistance" movements in other parts of the world, whether driven by nationalism or religion or some combination of the two, might ponder carefully.

–Jeff Weintraub